Hospitals warned on lessons of Climbie case

Four years after the murder of Victoria Climbie, NHS hospitals have still not introduced vital reforms aimed at detecting whether children have died from abuse.

The NSPCC has warned that reforms promised after the eight-year-old's death have not materialised and that abuse assessment procedures in hospitals are chaotic.

Abuse was not usually identified as causing a child's death unless doctors had firm evidence of injury or a parent's confession.

An NSPCC spokesman said: "Such evidence has to prove 'beyond all reasonable doubt' that a child has been abused, which is rarely possible in maltreatment cases." Doctors were often scared to identify abuse because they feared litigation, the spokesman added.